(urth) god(s) and gods
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Mon Nov 29 10:42:27 PST 2010
> Jane Delawney-
> Not at all sure what this means but anyway ...
>
> Why is Typhon known as Pas on the Whorl? The noxious kind-of-canines
> which roam the Whorl's ventilation / heat-exchange system are known by
> the Whorl's chem soldiers (and also by Vironese convicts consigned to
> the Pits) as gods, because they are the exact reverse of what one
> would normally expect a domesticated dog to be (ferocious instead of
> benign, unmanageable rather than obedient, and so forth). Silk is a
> little leery of this designation for obvious reasons, but uses it none
> the less because there is no other name for them. 'Pas' is Serbo-Croat
> for 'dog'. And Typhon/Pas is in most ways the exact reverse of what
> many would expect a father-god to be; he's a 'dog' rather than a
> 'god'. Would not be at all unlike GW to introduce this kind of
> bilingual pun ... just because. It gets all of us scratching our
> heads, and is pretty amusing once one has figured it out - yet it has
> no deeper significance at all, it's just Typhon (or rather GW through
> 'Typhon') having a laugh. Any views?
This is not unlikely.
I have elsewhere posited that the name of the city "Viron" is associated
with the word for werewolf, "vironsusi". Wolfe would have either come
across this term while researching the werewolves in Herodotus or became
interested in Herodotus for the same reason he would be researching
foreign words related to "wolf".
http://urth.org/whorlmap/viron
For the same reason, he be expected to look up foreign words, especially
European words, for "dog", since European grey wolves are the ancestors
of all dogs.
I like this reference a lot, Jane, since I have always thought there was
too little to firm ground for Wolfe choice in this analogy. "Pas = dog"
and "god=dog" provides an etymological reason that the dogs of the
underworld are reverse of the celestial Whorl gods (who are themselves
daemons/demons, because a daemon is a spirit and a programming function).
http://urth.org/whorlmap/bufe.htm
And additionally, of course, as we discussed before, "pas" is Koine
Greek for "all", that is Pan, and Pan is the only god to die in
historical time. Also, Zeus's died as well and his grave was honored in
Crete. Layer upon layer.
u+16b9
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